Today in Cold War History
1947 – First flight of the B-45 Tornado strategic bomber.
1948 – The Benelux, France, and the United Kingdom sign the Treaty of Brussels, a precursor to the North Atlantic Treaty establishing NATO.
1957 – A plane crash in Cebu, Philippines kills Philippine President Ramon Magsaysay and 24 others.the crash had been caused by metal fatigue
1958 – The United States launches the Vanguard 1 satellite.
1959 – Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, flees Tibet for India.
1960 – U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower signs the National Security Council directive on the anti-Cuban covert action program that will ultimately lead to the Bay of Pigs Invasion.
1965 Vietnam War 17th March, 1965: Word was out that the United States had invaded communist regions of Laos. The U.S. had dropped more than 20 tons of bombs in this location.
1966 – Off the coast of Spain in the Mediterranean, the DSV Alvin submarine finds a missing American hydrogen bomb. On 17 March 1966, Alvin was used to locate a submerged 1.45-megaton hydrogen bomb lost in a United States Air Force midair accident over Palomares, Spain. The bomb, found resting nearly 910 metres (2,990 ft) deep, was raised intact on 7 April. On 6 July 1967, the Alvin was attacked by a swordfish during dive 202. The swordfish became trapped in the Alvin’s skin, and the Alvin was forced to make an emergency surface. The attack took place at 2,000 feet (610 m) below the surface. The fish was recovered at the surface and cooked for dinner.
1968- As a result of nerve gas testing in Skull Valley, Utah, over 6,000 sheep are found dead.The international infamy of the incident contributed to President Richard Nixon’s decision to ban all open-air chemical weapon testing in 1969.
1969: Golda Meir becomes first female Prime Minister of Israel, she had been born in Russia but the family had emigrated to the United States and she had gone to school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She was one of twenty-four signatories (two of them women) of the Israeli declaration of independence on May 14th, 1948 .
1970 – My Lai Massacre: The United States Army charges 14 officers with suppressing information related to the incident.
1973 – The Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph Burst of Joy is taken, depicting a former prisoner of war being reunited with his family, which came to symbolize the end of United States involvement in the Vietnam War.
1978: Israel continues it’s attacks on southern Lebanon forcing hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees in vans, lorries and old buses to head for the safety of Beirut . The Israeli attacks in southern Lebanon are in retaliation for the bus hijacking in Tel Aviv in which 35 people were killed and 100 others were injured 5 days earlier.
1988 – Eritrean War of Independence: The Nadew Command, an Ethiopian army corps in Eritrea, is attacked on three sides by military units of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front in the opening action of the Battle of Afabet.

My goal with this blog is to offend everyone in the world at least once with my words… so no one has a reason to have a heightened sense of themselves. We are all ignorant, we are all found wanting, we are all bad people sometimes.